From an older topic:
Cassini simply reports occurrences of the product being installed or uninstalled in the format of <SKU>Inc(redment)/Dec(rement). As you noted, nothing else is being sent - no cookies, nothing. This little anonymous ping lets us know which product is more important to the community. For example, when we started writing Cassini, ASP.NET 2.0 was just being introduced and we thought that people were mostly interested in ASP.NET 1.1 support, and added 2.0 just in case when 1.1 product was almost ready for release. Boy, were we wrong! Thanks to these pings we found out that ASP.NET 2.0 product was twice as popular in the beginning and is about five times more popular than 1.1 now. This, in turn, let's us think strategically and consider whether we need to keep 2.0 and 1.1 products on the same release schedule and keep the same feature set. May be yes for another year, but after that we may create another version of Cassini 2.0 based on HTTP.SYS, which will be closer to IIS in functionality than to Cassini. But that will only be possible with reliable information on what people really need.
Please help your customers to understand that since we give away Cassini for free, the information about products being installed and removed eventually help only people who use it as developers and end users. You may have never gotten this product and the set of features if we didn't have this little feature. We can also tell that people are mostly happy with the product because about 80% of installed product instaces were kept. The ping will be our first alarm bell if we see the satisfaction level start slipping.
The bottom line is that this ping is not something you give with getting nothing for it. The value of the ping comes back to you and your customers a few months later in the form of the another strong and reliable release of the product.
In case your customers have problem with the ping anyway, you could redirect the call to the dead end by programmatically modifying "hosts" file with bogus IP assigned to crm.ultidev.com. This won't make Cassini installation fail and will not send the ping out either.
Please let us know what you think.
Best regards,
UltiDev Team.
So with this "ping" ... how am I supposed to install Cassini to a maschine which is not connected to the internet?
Best Regards,
Martin
